


Reset

by thephilosophersapprentice



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alternate World War II, Gen, Nazis, POV Second Person, Tie-in to "Klein's Story", World War II, go check it out guys, i think it's still available as a free download on the big finish web site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21888931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thephilosophersapprentice/pseuds/thephilosophersapprentice
Summary: In a splintered timeline where he's dead and the TARDIS in enemy hands, the Doctor wakes up in a ditch, remembering nothing.
Relationships: Eighth Doctor & The Doctor's TARDIS
Kudos: 7





	Reset

The first thing you know is darkness and cold and the dark bottom of a (fortunately dry) ditch. You don’t know where or even who you are. Your clothes feel unnatural; too loose and too tight all at once. The pant cuffs are maybe an inch too short; the sleeves are short as well. You try to slide your hands into the coat sleeves in an attempt to keep them warm. Nothing you are wearing is enough to keep the cold out, or protect you from the scratching and prickling of the dead twigs and leaves lining the ditch. Nothing feels right. Your shoes are too cramped, too tight; you are sore and ache all over, your limbs feel like pins and needles are sticking numbly in them, and you are hungry. But some instinct urges you to get up, to _move_. Danger danger danger. Here. Get away. Find safety.

You get up and move as quietly as you can. You trust to luck or instinct to guide you. No one shouts. You are safe—for now.

You keep walking, investigating your clothes as you move. Not period-appropriate, you note, and wonder what that means. The pockets, though, are full of useful things. Under your vest, your shirt collar, shoulder and chest are stained with dark reddish-orange blood, but there is no mark on you. You don’t quite know why this doesn’t horrify you more than it does.

You steal the first clothes you find that might be an approximate fit and discard the blood-stained ones in a field to bewilder some poor farmer, emptying the pockets as best as you can and carrying off the most useful items in an also-stolen shoulder bag. You keep moving, and you don’t look back.

There was a curious key in one of your pockets—just an odd-shaped lump of metal—you don’t even know why you called it a key, though you did—but it seems to hum under your fingers. It feels good. Soothing. Reassuring. Something familiar in this world where nothing is.

As you walk, pieces come back to you—words, names, places you can’t recall ever visiting. TARDIS. Regeneration. IanBarbaraZoeJamieVictoriaAdricPeriEvelyn. They don’t convey any meaning, but they sound nice.

At sunrise, you are far, far away from the cold, dark ditch where, for all intents and purposes, your life began. You buy breakfast with some of the money you found in your pockets in a little hamlet. The language isn’t your own—what _is_ your own?—but somehow you speak it. You understand it. Your mind offers you just enough to get along, to keep from being noticed. Being noticed means death—perhaps permanent this time.

You are a survivor. You keep moving.

As you lie in a barn, waiting for sleep, one name comes back to you. Doctor. You hold onto that.

You wake up again, fully rested, long before dawn, and you set off again.

The next few days are an odd sort of agony—waiting feverishly for you know not what. Faces are unfamiliar, but they bring back flashes of clarity to your mind, puzzle and torment you with their simultaneous strangeness and bizarre familiarity. Oh, that looks like Ace. Is that Benny? Benton? Yates? Pieces slowly fit themselves together in the patchwork of your mind.

(When you do remember Ace, you spend several hours alternately crying and vomiting in the outhouse of a sympathetic farm wife. Something about her daughter, however, makes your skin crawl, and you move on again just as soon as you can.

(You have a feeling that your past self wouldn’t approve of your current weakness, but you also know that, right now, _you don’t care_.

(And this is the first time you encounter rage, cold, cunning, and fierce, burning you and warming you, and you know that you are something both wonderful and terrible—an angel of mercy and an angel of death.

(You are not only survivor. You are predator.)

A week later, knowledge pours into your mind in a sudden flood:

GallifreyRassilonTardisvortexEyeofHarmonyregenerationTimeLordWebofTimetimetimetime…

This _should not have happened_.

 _Show me_ , you whisper to the Vortex, and you see it: gunned down in a San Francisco alley, regenerating, amnesia, clocks stopping, the Eye of Harmony, Grace Holloway, Chang Lee, the Master.

All so far away now. Who knows where they are, what they’re doing, if they even live in this broken time stream.

The TARDIS—you can see it now—will not be where you left her. You have a pretty good guess where she is now, but you bide your time.

Even in this distorted version of history, you are still a Time Lord. Time plays into your hands just the same as it forces your hearts to keep beating and flies through your mind in an endless caress.

Time is on your side.

You _know_ what Hitler and his goose-stepping hellspawn will do, and the same rage you felt when you remembered Ace floods you again. You remake your vow on your blood and hers, for the sake of all the innocents you swear to save. You throw yourself into that vow with all the focused passion, energy and intellect that this new body possesses.

Seventeen years pass. The Doctor is a ghost story, an avenger to the guilty, a rescuer to the innocent. You keep moving, maintain your cover identity, try to hide the fact that you haven’t aged a day in all that time. Every day you know—you _must_ get back to San Francisco. You wait. You plan.

You wake up one morning, and the key—the TARDIS key—is hot. Someone has been tampering with your beloved ship. Your time has come. You clutch the key—no need for resistance contacts or the massive spy network you’ve painstakingly built and maintained—all the information you need—location, identity of transgressor, situation—telepathically delivered, straight to you. _I’m coming, my dear_ , you send back. The response is puzzling, as feedback from your ship generally is—thanktheifbringmebackresetcomebackwantyoubackmine—but it doesn’t confuse you, somehow. You know exactly what she means.

You have Time to reset.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few years ago and I believe posted it on Fanfiction.net. However, it's been sitting in my email drafts for over a year and I thought I might as well share it here. (As for why it was in my email drafts, they can be saved indefinitely and sometimes you don't have access to all the normal tools, such as Microsoft Word. I don't like keeping them there, though.)


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